II-VI quantum dots (QDs) are of keen scientific interest due to their size-dependent optoelectronic properties, which make them viable candidates for a plethora of fields including biomedics (Weller, H. et al. (2014) Z. Phys. Chem. 228: 183-192.), solar power (Kamat, P. V. (2012) Acc. Chem. Res. 45: 1906-1915), LEDs, electronic displays (Schreuder, M. A. et al. (2010) Nano Lett. 10: 573-576), and agriculture (Ung, T. D. T. et al. (2012) Adv. Nat. Sci.: Nanosci. Nanotechnol. 3(043001): 11). Efforts to improve the effectiveness of QDs for these applications continue through the utilization of ligand exchanges (Owen, J. S. et al. (2008) J. Am. Chem. Soc. 130: 12279-12281), cation exchanges (Beberwyck, B. J. et al. (2013) J. Phys. Chem. C 117: 19759-19770), and doping (Sun, X. et al. (2014) J. Am. Chem. Soc. 136, 1706-1709).
Ferroelectrics belong to a subset of pyroelectrics, a division of piezoelectrics. Piezoelectrics possess a dynamic relationship between energy and crystal anisotropy; pyroelectrics exhibit a nonzero net polarization that changes with temperature. Ferroelectrics possess all the mentioned properties for both piezoelectrics and pyroelectrics, with the additional benefit of undergoing polarization reversal within an applied electric field. Thus, in addition to all of the applications for piezo- and pyroelectrics (Garbovskiy, Y. et al. (2013) InTech 475-497), ferroelectrics are also ideal for use in memory and electrochemical devices (Varghese, J. et al. (2013) J. Mater. Chem. C 1: 2618-2638), including, for example, non-volatile digital memories, thin film capacitors, electronic transducers, actuators, high-k dielectrics, pyroelectric sensors, electrooptic modulators, optical memories, and nonlinear optics.
Despite the wide range of applications, there remains a scarcity of microscale and nanoscale ferroelectric materials. Accordingly, disclosed herein are ferroelectric agglomerates and methods of producing and using same.